Why This Startup Thinks It Can Slam Google

Sivi, a virtual personal assistant, launched today. Its founder
calls it the only search engine and task completion service
you'll ever need.

You can request anything you need, from finding and reserving a
reservation at the Apple Genius Bar to researching the best way to
clean a mattress. Sivi's "concierges"—online workers based in the
U.S.—will get back to you within a matter of minutes.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is.

Sivi isn't the first to try the human-powered search concept.

There's Mahalo.com, which started off as a
human-powered search engine that used real people to sift through
search results to provide the best content. But it has
since pivoted to focus more on online courses.

In some sense, Sivi is also similar to personal-assistant
services like Fancy
Hands.

But Sivi founder Nicholas Seet, a guy who sold a
video-advertising startup, Auditude, to Adobe for $120 million last year, thinks
there's a gap in the market that Sivi can fill.

"The big picture that is truly exciting is, imagine if you could
ask your phone for anything, to search for anything, and to do
anything, then who needs Google anymore?" Seet sats. "And that concept
that I have now displaced the search engine because I don’t need
to search for places to go. I can ask my phone to find them or do
them, or make reservations and I don’t need to have ten blue
links to waive through."

With Sivi, you just get one correct answer, and that's the big
picture Seet is going for with Sivi.

But here's the caveat: Those workers don't work for free. Sivi
costs $5 per request right now. Seet hopes to waive that fee as
the company grows.